The Avariel, the Mad Wizard, and the Desecrated Grave
by Blue-Inked Frost
Summary: Xzar and Aerie are trapped in the old temple of a sun god. They find five skeletons in an ancient grave, all but one marred by a violent death. To return to their friends, they must uncover the mystery of the dead child priestess and her family who died to protect her.


_Note:_ Written for Shadowy_Dumbo_Octopus. This is a Xzar story with skulls in it, so I hope that you enjoy this.

—

The temple wall collapsed in a mass of huge grinding stone. Ancient dust puffed through the passageway as the large stone slabs inexorably fell, separating Aerie and Xzar from the rest of the group. The sandstone blocks were as wide as a human's torso and three times as deep. It would take an age for them to be rescued. Aerie covered her face with her hands and felt tears come against her will. Just for a moment, she could be weak. Her friends would save her -

"What's wrong, my plucked toothsome pheasant?" Xzar's high mad voice jangled in her ear, as it always did. Aerie looked at him. She couldn't help herself.

What she saw made her scream. It was the face of a yellow skull with flesh moving and dripping like molten wax. Aerie shrieked and fell backward into another pile of rubble.

Xzar lowered the torch he'd held under his chin to create the illusion of a skull's face, and cackled wildly. He laughed so hard that he lost his footing as well, and cackled even more on the ground, waving his scrawny calves in the air as if he were riding an invisible unicycle. The torch sputtered out.

 _That wasn't very funny at all_ , Aerie thought miserably. She was grateful to the Hero of the Sword Coast, the Bhaalchild of Candlekeep, for rescuing her circus and her Uncle Quayle, and she had been happy to join the quest to find the Bhaalchild's sister Imoen and help however she could. She liked Dynaheir and Minsc and Yoshimo, but she had no idea why Xzar of all people was invited to come with them. Xzar was dangerously unbalanced, talked about eating people as if he really did it, was extremely fascinated by people's skulls including when they were still attached to people's heads, and was in all probability a very evil man.

Aerie made herself get up slowly, using her hands to help her to her feet. This rubble was oddly shaped. Her hands were on something long and thin and rounded. Not stone nor metal. With her elven sight in the dark, she looked down and saw it. Horror ruled her and she screamed again. She had fallen on a grave, amidst skeletons, their bones tangled all around her. Her fingers met the teeth of a skull. Empty eyesockets stared blackly up at her. She fought her way free, scattering small bones along the ground, and stood as far away from that desecrated gravesite as possible, trembling.

"You've found something! A hit, a very palpable hit. Luck lies with innocents and madmen, or maybe I just make my own." Xzar giggled. He relit the torch so he could inspect the site. "Let's cast dice with the bones and build funny looking sculptures out of them, shall we? I call the big skull over there. I fancy it for a face-mask."

"These are people who died and I s-shan't let you desecrate their bodies," Aerie said, cringing at the sound of her own unwanted stutter. And she knew she couldn't make the mad wizard do anything - Xzar was quite frightening, casting bizarre spells that Aerie couldn't begin to understand, and he was also unusually tall for a human, which made him tower over an elf on the short side like Aerie.

"If you'd like to find something else to do while we're trapped, be my guest," Xzar cooed. "Sing merry songs? Tell me a story about your flying ancestors or your little raccoon god? I like the ones with bears and gold in them, by the way. Do you see a passable way through?"

Aerie did study the room, then, hoping against hope that perhaps there was a back way out. But it was a narrow chamber, the other walls solid and close to the point of wakening her claustrophobia. She couldn't bear to be trapped underground, in this place so like a cage. _Baervan help me, please send my friends to help me soon_ , she pleaded inside herself.

Xzar started talking again. Aerie felt his breath on her cheek; he had somehow snuck up next to her, too close. She shivered. "I envy elven eyes," he breathed. "Avariel eyeballs are more exophthalmic than most; you have magnificent eyes."

In the Copper Coronet, Salvanas the elf had said something similar to Aerie. He'd also called Dynaheir exotic and suggested she warm his nethers with some discreetly applied fire spells. Uncle Quayle had warned Aerie about men like that, and she'd decidedly avoided Salvanas.

There was no way that Xzar's compliments came from the same motives as Salvanas. They were somehow even worse.

"Air vision and night vision," Xzar continued. "I tried to take sight like yours, once or twice. But 'tis more than just cutting out their eyes from their heads."

Aerie rushed away from him, unable to bear any more of it. She saw Xzar kneel down and pick up a human femur, scraping the dust from it in a way that almost looked respectful. At least he wasn't trying to eat it. He summoned a magelight to shine a small, precise beam on the bone.

"Likely a human male; large size; significant scraping striations here, as if a crushing blade and a terrible wound." Xzar laughed to himself. "Why are there one, two, three ... the pieces of roughly ten legs here, four adult, four near-adult, and two distinctly _not_? Such an interesting riddle."

Aerie looked over Xzar's shoulders. She couldn't help it. It occurred to her that these bodies had not been interred here with much respect to begin with. They were tangled together, with marks of violence on the bones. Something terrible had happened here, and understanding what it was might well form part of the key to this horrible place. The temple had once belonged to a sun god, but it was now taken over by dread creatures of darkness. Aerie and her companions had faced shadow wolves and shambling things that looked as if they had once been men, but collapsed in an awful black sludge when they were defeated.

"P-perhaps ... " Aerie stuttered. "We should learn what happened."

"Then come and be my lovely magician's assistant, and I shan't eat your bones," Xzar promised.

Aerie worked with Xzar to carefully retrieve and lay out the bones, trying to match the ones that belonged together. They were fragile and brittle after so many years; Aerie snipped off a piece of her underskirt and frilled it into a sort of brush to gently knock off the dirt. She was fascinated almost despite herself. She was a healer, and although she didn't usually work with corpses, Uncle Quayle had taught her enough anatomy to make sense of what they were doing.

"Are these ... knife wounds around the eyes?" Aerie asked, staring into the grim visage of a woman's skull. Probably a woman's skull; the mandible was more rounded and there wasn't much of a brow ridge. Images of dreadful tortures flashed vaguely and briefly through her mind.

"Still your delightful imagination, sky-fallen seeker! These are tiny tooth marks from _Rodentia Myomorpha_ ; similar to Rattus nigra, a familiar old friend in Zhentil Keep. Particularly tasty wrapped in onion-skin. I suppose these particular poor rats are long dead, with nothing to sustain them," Xzar said.

 _Or also turned into small shadow-creatures_ , Aerie thought, and tried not to think about black undead rats scuttling out of the darkness to bite at her feet.

"This arrowhead was deeply lodged in his - her - rib," Aerie said. She was working on what seemed to be a young adult woman; Xzar had told her that the fused clavicle meant she was probably older than twenty, but the sagittal suture in her skull was unfused and she likely hadn't reached her thirties. Human remains were easier to date than elven, though it was still very imprecise.

"At that angle when she was alive? A rather deadly wound," Xzar said. "She had a few childhood fractures that healed over time - her patella, her ulna - but this looks like how she was killed. An arrow to the chest and a crude blow to her neck to finish her off. All but one of our skeletons are marked by violence."

They had worked for long hours. Their friends had not yet been able to pierce the barrier that separated them; or, at any rate, Aerie had decided to assume it was only a question of time and that their friends were otherwise safe. In the tomb, some of the bones were broken and missing, lost to time and scavengers and various wear over the years, but Aerie and Xzar had more or less assembled five skeletons. Aerie could image them as a family, probably a loving family when they were alive. Two adults, a man and a woman; two young adults, both women; and the last the saddest of all, a small girl. It was she who was not marked by any obvious violence.

"Suffocation leaves few signs on a skeleton," Xzar said. "'Twas a case in Zhentil Keep; a wealthy widow, priestess of Lord Bane, wed one of Fzoul's necromancer apprentices. The lady dies in her sleep; her relict merrily chooses to dissolve the flesh and preserve the bones in memory; the bones were re-examined, the verdict not proven. Slight discolouration around the nasal arrangement and mandible perhaps indicated foul play, but none could show it."

Aerie stared at Xzar. It was difficult to tell the human's age, below his tattoos and his neglect of himself; sometimes he seemed like he was of an age with the Child of Bhaal, sometimes much older - and sometimes, at least in maturity level, significantly younger. Perhaps she could find out how fused his sagittal suture was - no, that was a terrible thought and Xzar was a bad influence on her. "You w-weren't ... were you the apprentice?" Aerie asked aloud, speaking her guess.

"I was that apprentice's apprentice," Xzar corrected. "It didn't last long. He was no fun at all." The mad wizard gave her one of his razor-sharp, beehive-wide grins that reminded Aerie of some predatory creature from a bizarre dimension rising out of the mist at dawn.

Xzar placed the last bone carefully in position, a tiny phalanx in a hand. They stepped back to see their work, the five skeletons untangled and reassembled.

And then shadow-stuff crept up from the ground and seemed to boil around the five bodies. Darkness rippled through the room, blinding even Aerie's elven sight. They had partly solved the puzzle, and this was their reward.

This was the trap they had found.

Aerie woke up. She was sitting with her knees hugged to her chest against the far wall of the cave. She saw her parents. Fayanna and Cytorissos of Faenya-Dail. Her mother's wind-worn and gentle face, her father's golden beauty that her mother used as a model for so many of her wonderful statues. She'd thought she would never see them again. She wanted to run into their arms as if she were a child again and the painful years had never happened; she wanted to tell them how sorry she was she'd disobeyed them and flown where she was not supposed to fly; she wanted to fly with them once more on wings that had been brutally sawn off her body while she screamed.

There was something strange about Aerie's parents. Their wings had jet black feathers instead of white.

"You have lost your wings forever," her mother said. "Just as we lost ours, searching for you. We traded our wings to a witch who promised she knew a way to find you."

"But we found new wings. Stronger wings," her father said. "You can never regain that which you have lost. But you can find that which is better."

Aerie backed away from them, from those perfect images of her long-lost mother and father. There was nowhere for her to back to. Her shoulders scraped against the stone wall.

"You were ground underfoot in your cage," her mother said. "Flight, health, and even sanity were stolen from you. Quayle took you in, but he could not mend your brokenness."

Aerie did not know how this shade of her mother knew Quayle. She would have liked for Uncle Quayle to meet her parents, even if that was impossible. Her adopted uncle had saved her when she thought she would die, when she thought she would perhaps starve herself to death to be free of her drudgery and crawling on the ground like a worm. But there was still so much of her that Uncle Quayle couldn't fix; that nobody could fix. Aerie knew inside herself that she would always be childish and foolish and stuttering and weak.

"But there is power in you," Aerie's father told her. "You have soared on the Weave. Do you not realise that in the few tendays you have travelled, you have mastered spells most wizards do not master in years?"

"Can you not see that you grasp divine power, that you have combined godly and arcane magic in ways that few can do?" her mother said. "There is power and potential within you. There is a way forward to develop that power."

"Be honest with yourself. After your wings were torn from your body, didn't you long to tear apart slavers and find how they would feel to lose limbs?" Aerie's father said. "After they chained you and kept you in a cage like an animal, did you not see that _they_ were the animals - the vermin who must be hunted down?"

"They sold you and they will do the same to others as long as they live," chimed in Aerie's mother, following on her father as closely if the two of them sung a song that only they knew. "You would be right to destroy them. You would be in the right to make them lose everything, just as you did."

"Fear not, our dear and beloved child," Aerie's father said. "We bring an offer. An offer from one who understands your pain. One who offers a salve that never fails. The salve of a soft darkness, where you can forget."

"The salve of inflicting that loss on others," Aerie's mother breathed. "Quench them. Destroy every last slaver in the Forgotten Realms. You cannot regain what is lost, but you can gain what is stronger and more worthy."

"Just look at us," her father said. "We sought you with the Lady of Loss, for you were lost. She made us into that which is greater than we were."

"It is the Lady of Loss who smiles upon you and extends her hand." Aerie's mother held out her own hands, as she had done long ago, steady calloused hands, work-worn from carving glass and marble, calling Aerie to her embrace. "Be blessed, our child."

"Turn your prayers to the Lady of Loss," Aerie's father said. "For that you will become a beacon of vengeance. Slavers everywhere will die in darkness, and you will soar in the night on black wings of shadow."

Aerie finally asked a question. "And s-should I turn down the Lady of Loss?" she inquired.

"The Lady does not easily brook fools, since her favour is so hard to obtain. You would be a fool indeed; you would lose all your friends; and you yourself would perish in shadow," said Aerie's mother.

"I t-thought that might be the case," Aerie said. She inwardly blessed Uncle Quayle for teaching her most of the names and appellations of the gnomish and human pantheons.

The Lady of Loss was Shar, the goddess of darkness. Shar longed to return the world to nothing but the primal darkness before creation. Flawless nothingness was her goal, when everything in all the Realms was dead. Shar was an evil deity, she was likely the dark presence that had infected this ancient temple of a sun god and rotted it from the inside out with her shadow creatures, and everything inside Aerie rejected Shar and her works.

Except for that dark part inside Aerie, that part of her that would hunt down slavers and show them as little mercy as they had once shown her. That part of her that had mustered resolve to hit Kalah with her staff when he tried to kill her Uncle Quayle, that part of her that spilt Kalah's brains over the floor of a circus tent through her divine-granted strength. That part of her that could fling raw arcane fire into people who tried to hurt her friends.

That part of her that Xzar probably approved of.

Once, these skeletons clothed in the illusion of flesh had likely been somebody's parents. They must have loved their children as much as Aerie's father and mother loved her. Aerie imagined that the group of five were once a family, mother and father and three daughters, two near-grown and one small child, a child that they had likely all fought to protect from a terrible death.

 _Baervan help me_ , Aerie thought. She felt a tear run down her cheek at the thought of harming anything that looked like her mother and father, but something in her knew what must be done. So she looked back at the shadows that wore beloved faces, and forced her own face to become a mask.

"What about my friend Xzar?" she asked them. Was Xzar a friend? Here in the darkness, he certainly counted as one - someone Aerie wanted to bring alive and safe out of this place. "You promised me power that I could use to help my friends."

"He too is long broken by loss," Aerie's father said, and moved aside to let her see him.

It was the two older daughters who pursued Xzar. They had him backed into the wall.

"Could we please you with dark sensory delights?" one asked. A red tongue licked out of her mouth. She had raven black hair that flowed around her in delicate curls and luscious dark eyes, like some ancient fertility goddess in etchings. "You're a Zhent, you understand what I'm talking about."

"Lose yourself in pleasure instead of a shattered mind," the other one breathed. She looked identical to her sister, leaning in close to Xzar and letting her skin brush over his. "We can make you forget all that troubles you."

Xzar shook his head, bit his lip so hard it bled, and put his hands over his eyes like a child trying to hide. "That won't work on me," he managed to say. "Fly away, you wretched creatures of shadow and bone! My interests in you are strictly academic."

One of the goddesses smiled at her sister. "It seems he's too pathetic for seduction to work. What say we try something else?"

They shifted shape into two different women, in less time than a heartbeat. Aerie couldn't see the exact time they transformed; it was so flawless that it felt as if they had always been in those shapes. One became an older human woman with light brown skin and graham hair, and one was an exact fascimile of the Child of Bhaal. Her smile was the same, a mix of fierceness and uncertainty, the same fading scars on her face and neck, even exactly the same tangles in her hair.

"You'll want to look at us, Xzar," said the older woman.

Seemingly against his will, Xzar peeled down one of his hands. His left eye stared green at the two of them. "Mummy?" he said in a small voice.

"And me," said the Child of Bhaal. "To have the two of us is very symbolic, isn't it? You'd better appreciate it."

"You deserve to feel grief and guilt for what you've done," said the woman who must look like Xzar's mother.

The mad wizard cowered back against the cave wall. "Let me pretend; I'll play your illusion game and maybe make myself believe, just for a moment. It's better than nothing."

"Do you remember the mines under Nashkel?" the Child of Bhaal said, as if she had plucked a memory from Xzar's mind like a ripe peach. "We were in darkness, alone, kobold skeletons and glittering fossils surrounding us below the lake. We had just slain Mulahey, no great battle, only a desperate sordid struggle on befouled ground. My arm was in a thousand pieces and you numbed it with a ghoul's touch, then slowly pieced the shards in place. First the small labyrinth, then the larger one; we journeyed along the threads together."

"But your soul is filthy," the other woman said. "If the Child of Bhaal knew the half of it, she would never forgive you. Into the darkness once more. Into the small black cage that's waiting for you. You're not fit for decent company."

The Child of Bhaal seemed to grow taller and her face almost shine, like a goddess, becoming more perfected. "You want the power inside me, don't you? Even though it will burn you to death. At best, you will be alone after I reach my destiny. At worst, well ... I think you know."

Xzar cringed. He let out a shriek as the Bhaalchild raised a hand toward him, as if she would grab his shoulder. Aerie had heard him scream in nightmares before when they camped. Some terrifying dreams must haunt him.

"You promised me power?" Aerie repeated, beckoning the two shadows in the shape of her parents closer. "Come to me. Show me how to gain that and depart this place."

The two shadows came closer and closer. Aerie spun something in the Weave, small fine silvery threads of magic so faint they might as well have been cobwebs, almost undetectable to any other spellcaster. Her cobwebs followed the tread of the two skeletons, wrapping gently around them. They came closer and closer to her.

"Give me your hand, daughter," Aerie's mother said, gazing at her with the same dove-coloured eyes she'd always had, "and the bargain is sealed." The hand came almost close enough to touch.

Then Aerie pulled on the threaded trap she'd made. The figures were suddenly wrenched back, her cobwebs tightening and holding them away. " _Fiat Lux!_ " she cried to the heavens, and her god Baervan Wildwanderer granted her light. The god of Uncle Quayle, who had brought her out of her cage. The god of her adopted family, the gnome god of forests and raccoons and mushrooms and exploring and adventure.

The shattering beam of bright sunlight rained down within the cave. It caught the four animated shadows where they were, blazing around them, dissipating their black illusions that pretended to be other faces. Xzar and Aerie were unharmed by the blaze. When the divine light was done, the skeletons were dust. Aerie and Xzar looked at each other amidst the fading images. Aerie had seen more of the mad wizard's soul, perhaps, that he would have chosen to show her. Once he had a mother; and something in him did have some feeling for the Child of Bhaal, as terrible as that outcome might be ...

"Oh ... " Xzar said, resigned to it all. "Well done, I suppose."

"Thank you," said a little girl. She wore the robes of a priestess, emblazoned with a bright red sun. The robes were seemingly as bright and new as if they had just left a seamstress' needle, hundreds of years ago. She walked over to them. "I am Amauna. I was prophetess here, priestess, beloved. My family fought to save me from the shadow, but they were lost. You have sent them to their grave at last. Thank you, strangers."

She was a little girl who was murdered, a long time ago. Aerie wanted to cry for her. Amauna made a gesture with her hands, touching a certain thread that ran along the rock, and a secret door opened within the room. They walked into another part of the old temple, furnished in old gold and ancient rippled glass that ran down the walls in distorted tears like waterfalls. The rivers of glass glinted with sudden light as they passed, reflecting curious shapes and colours that seemed as if they came from another world.

"You have solved one riddle," Amauna said. "You are welcome to this sanctum. What you must do here I ... I do not remember." She shook her head in confusion. "Why don't I remember? It was only yesterday. Where are everyone, the priests and worshippers, the merchants and the cooks, the other children who would play in the sun-gardens? What has happened to my temple?"

It seemed so cruel to answer her. Aerie was mute. Xzar plucked an old dusty cup from a golden shelf. Below the centuries of grime and decay, it looked to have been once made from precious metals and richly encrusted with gems, a vessel for ceremonies dedicated to the midday sun. He blew a cloud of dust and soot off it, and handed it to the girl. "Is this yours?" he said.

"I don't like it any more," Amauna said. The child let it drop from her hands. Maybe it reminded her of painful memories, bringing back thoughts and indications that led to her death and that of her beloved family. "Can you show me what I should do in this sanctum?"

One wall was designed in a profusion of sundials arranged in strange angles, emerging purely from the rippled glass with scarcely a distinction between coloured glass and sundial-copper. Aerie's eyes fell on the shape of it, as if she were looking on a landscape while flying high in the air and trying to piece together the sense of it. She saw connections, patterns between the angles, and considered how this wall would look when the temple was in its glory days. Once, this roof had been open, although now rubble and soil had fallen in. The sun would shine straight on this wall; how would it appear when the sun was at its zenith? What shape would then be cast in the shadows and glitters of the mighty noonday star? Aerie began the incantation for a magelight under her breath, curious and interested.

Xzar tugged at her sleeve, breaking the spell. "Come! Amauna and I are having a tea party."

Somehow, Xzar had a silver-plated kettle and delicate china cups, either produced from somewhere in his robes or summoned through a spell. He brewed tea over a green-tinged flame made from his strange alchemy.

Xzar had done this before, on the road; but the less you knew about Xzar's cooking methods the better off you were. You didn't want to trust anything he brewed at all, no matter the tempting coffee smells that seemed to wake you up the moment you sensed an alluring tendril of it on the breeze, or the way he carefully arranged the foam on top of it in meticulous and intricate patterns of tiny skulls, anatomically accurate.

Still, there was no way he could possibly harm a girl who was already dead.

Xzar passed out the teacups and chatted to Amauna about a bizarre story they joined with each other in making up, about a desert dwarf and a manticore as they tried to steal horses from a group of witches of the sand. Aerie watched them at play. She felt miserable about her own silence. Aerie felt sorrow on the child priestess' behalf, but that same sorrow made her so anxious and guilty that she was unable to speak, crushed with the thought of saying something to further distress Amauna. Xzar, completely uninhibited, did much better at amusing the child.

In a strange way, Xzar was everything that a goddess of dark nothingness would hate. He was bright and positive and cheerful most of the time, laughing recklessly and wildly and telling queer stories of dragons with feet like rabbits and asking his companions to smile. Aerie's wings were broken, and parts of the innocent she'd once been were lost forever to dark misery. Xzar was broken by wounds that went deeper than the outside, but he still glittered and felt joy, like a shattered crystal where radiant light bounced back and forth in sharp patterns. It was these qualities that made him better at helping this child forget her dreadful fate, at least for a while.

But, as Aerie watched them, she felt a dark chill slowly run up her heart. She started to understand what this was. Xzar's hand on her arm to invite her to the tea-party took on a new significance. He did not like touching or being touched by others, unless he was warned beforehand. And Xzar was more than capable of subtlety. People who saw only his madness had no understanding of what he was truly capable of.

Xzar had stopped Aerie from revealing what she worked out for a reason. And she understood that reason.

Aerie's fingers found a small pouch of dried dandelion-seeds in her robes. She took a tiny handful of them, concealing the movement below the folds of her clothing. Slowly, subtly, she let the patterns of the Weave flow through her again. Her breathing slowed and she made herself one with the threads of magic. She prepared a simple spell that Uncle Quayle had taught her, years ago.

" _Sleep_ ," Aerie breathed. She flung the dandelion-seeds in the air. Gently, assuredly, they flew to Amauna. The child grew drowsy in the midst of her tea-party, and nodded off quietly, happy in the brief moment of sunshine she had shared with a new friend.

But the other half of Amauna, that which had animated her, did not sleep at all. It could not.

The black shadows erupted from what had been the child's body. Sharp as swords, they pierced Xzar's body and pinned him to the wall. He struggled and kicked in the creature's embrace.

The undead shadow was small like the child, but otherwise looked nothing like her. What passed for its body was a black void, an inky black so dark that it seemed to swallow all light around it. A purple aura passed along its edge.

"Give me the heart of this temple," said a woman's voice, and it was as thick and resonant as ten thousand raven wings susurrating together, as if under it were a multitude of tones so deep that a mortal ear could not hear them. "I took it and drove it to shadow, I corrupted Amaunator the sun god himself. There was but one part I did not find. You dared to turn down my offers, so I will take it from you."

The black figure turned its head - Aerie did not know how she knew this, as the shape was utterly black and no features could be seen. But she knew that she faced the avatar of a goddess, a great and terrible power in Faerun. A power that had wished to claim Aerie's soul, and had been rejected this day.

Shar's black swords reached out for Aerie. But Aerie understood that Shar thought she was needed to go to the temple's heart, a priestess and a mage both, perhaps the only one in their party who could understand both levels of the temple's secrets. Aerie didn't move. The black swords stopped the length of a fingernail's crescent from her face and body. Neither she nor the avatar shifted or breathed.

And that was when, behind them, Xzar flung a fireball.

The avatar of Shar held great power. But she was still tied to a long-dead body, a child's skeleton. The flames cut through the shadows Shar had surrounded herself with, and charred Amauna's bones. Xzar reached for all the flame spells he knew through the Weave, flinging them one after the other, burning first gold then blue and green and white. Aerie joined him with fire that came from both arcane magic and Baervan's prayers, and tried not to think of what she was doing.

Together, she and Xzar burned the body of the child-prophetess Amauna. At least she had been sent to sleep first. Aerie prayed she felt no pain. Aerie would have liked to think that, somewhere in the radiant flames, she glimpsed a ghostly shape coming free and drifting away into the heavens she deserved, but it was probably just an illusion.

Xzar shook out his sleeves, which were now empty of spell components. He gave Aerie a nod, as if from one professional to another.

"The Weave dances for you!" Xzar said. "A mighty patchwork of powers."

Aerie didn't feel the least like she'd acted the part of the heroic adventurer. But she had moved a step further on her journey, and seen some more of the tides and currents that ran inside the mad wizard.

She cast Baervan's light on the sundial wall, changing the angles until the dials shone to place the golden sigil of the Eternal Sun on the glass. The wall slid open.

Aerie and Xzar stepped out on a sort of balcony within the temple, once a ramp made in golden spruce wood. It was half rotted through, but it still led to another door, somewhere deeper toward the temple's secret path.

And below they saw a small group of people, working with spades and hammers to shift some of the rock, to rescue their lost friends. Aerie and Xzar hailed their friends from above, and the Child of Bhaal looked up and waved. Then they began to squabble about the best way to use ropes to get all the group up there.

—


End file.
